One of your responsibilities as a developer or team leader is to make sure you’ll be able to shine over time by constantly building confidence. This is why I strongly believe in maintaining a list of technical Features as part of your backlog. These are Features you believe will make the application more robust, provide better monitoring or make the team more productive (& happier) on their day-to-day work.

Have it to pass the message “we leave nothing as technical debt”

When someone in your team says “we really need to refactor this! it way too buggy and we cannot write tests for it”, don’t make it a technical debt that is written as a comment in the code or as a note on someone’s inbox. Make it a Feature, make it part of your backlog, pass the message that even though we cannot fix everything now, we will give it the right attention.

Have it to build confidence

Pick a few technical Features at each Sprint and make them a reality. This will make sure your team will be able to continue to produce fast and with great quality. Plan how much effort, from the entire Sprint, you would like to use to reduce waste – 1%? 5%? 10%? More? It’s really up to you. You need to balance it with thoughts of producing value to your customers while producing value to your team.

Have it for rough times

Having technical backlog is very useful when you need to re-plan the next few versions due to priority shift by the product teams, while your teammates are waiting for work. You can reduce pressure by letting them kill waste while you make certainty in the plans.